A LIFETIME OF BOOZE AND DRUGS GETS YOU: The pickled mind of Norman Mailer, who wrote this piece called “We went to war just to boost the white male ego.” The premise being that, since white guys suck at sports nowadays, we had to prove we were good at something — so we went to war.

I am not making this up. You think I am, but here’s a quote:

“The great white stars of yesteryear were for the most part gone, gone in football, in basketball, in boxing, and half-gone in baseball. Black genius now prevailed in all these sports (and the Hispanics were coming up fast; even the Asians were beginning to make their mark). We white men were now left with half of tennis (at least its male half), and might also point to ice-hockey, skiing, soccer, golf, (with the notable exception of the Tiger) as well as lacrosse, swimming, and the World-Wide Wrestling Federation — remnants and orts of a once-great and glorious centrality . . . On the other hand, the good white American male still had the Armed Forces.”

This is apparently not a joke — except that, of course, anything this schmo says anymore is by definition a joke.

4/29/2003

GOOGLE SEARCH CONTEST: Find a goofy Google search that pulls up Patterico’s Pontifications as the top site in the search results. For example, I am proud to say that if you search Google for: “Scheer + man + on + dog” — this site pops up first on the list. Winning entries get a mention.

Thanks to intrepid reader Richard for the idea and the “Scheer man on dog” search.

THIS IS THE THANKS I GET: Here’s a guy who swallowed eight bags of heroin. The cops (who have been watching him deal heroin and had already seized 30 packs of the drug from him) save his life by calling paramedics, who get the guy to vomit up the heroin he swallowed. Had they not done that, he would have died. Now he says his constitutional rights were violated and the vomited heroin can’t be used against him in court. Apparently, after seeing him “sweating profusely and breathing irregularly,” the cops asked him if he had swallowed any of the packets — without reading him his Miranda rights first!

Next will be a civil suit, I expect. Maybe he’ll get a few thousand dollars in a settlement. So it goes in this fabulous country of ours.

SCHEER STUPIDITY: It has been over a year since Robert Scheer published perhaps the stupidest opinion piece ever published in a newspaper. After yakking about how the Holocaust “provides the enduring rationale for Israeli brutality in the name of self-defense,” Scheer let loose with this — my personal candidate for stupidest thing said by anybody in the past decade:

“What irony that many Jews now comfortably vacation in Germany but insist that Arab anti-Semitism is an immutable aspect of Muslim culture that can be met only with the crushing power of tanks.”

I remember writing Scheer at the time and inviting him to explain the irony to me. See, I had always labored under the nutty, nutty misconception that Germany’s anti-Semitism had also been met with “the crushing power of tanks.” Whaddya know — he didn’t write me back.

Anyway, I realized this morning that I have a golden opportunity to expose his stupidity on a regular basis with my blog. And so I shall. Starting today, “Scheer Stupidity” will be a semi-regular feature.

Since this post is already long, I will keep today’s entry short. Today’s idiotic Scheer column states: “The only significant link between Al Qaeda and Hussein centered on the Ansar al Islam bases in the Kurdish area outside of Hussein’s control.” If only Robbie had been reading Patterico on Sunday when he published this post with this link to recent proof of the Al Qaeda/Hussein connection.

But that was Sunday — evidently not in time for Scheer’s deadline to get a column in on Tuesday — two days later. Here’s some real actual irony: the title of his column is “Are we dumb or just numb?” Heh.

NEGOTIATING WITH TERROR: Here’s a story about our war on terror. There is a group in Iraq whose members “killed several American military personnel and civilian contractors in the 1970’s and supported the takeover of the American Embassy in Tehran in 1979.” The group “has carried out dozens of bombings that were aimed at Iranian military and government workers, but that also killed civilians. . . . It was added to the State Department’s list of terrorist organizations in 1997.” Last week Pentagon officials said that the group had served as a “de facto security organization for the Iraqi government.”

We have just reached a deal (described here) with this group, which allows them to keep their weapons, including “artillery and antiaircraft guns” — as long as they agree not to use them against us.

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